


who knows how long I've loved you

by bookishandbossy



Category: Gilmore Girls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Flirting, Fluff, Romance, Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-30
Updated: 2017-04-30
Packaged: 2018-10-26 00:32:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10775733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookishandbossy/pseuds/bookishandbossy
Summary: Rory Gilmore goes to Europe on her own with three guidebooks, fifteen novels, and a sturdy pair of walking shoes.  Theoretically, she's prepared for anything.  Except for Jess Mariano.





	who knows how long I've loved you

**Author's Note:**

> This is a canon-divergent AU in which Jess never moved to Stars Hollow and basically an excuse for me to write Literati being cute all over Europe.
> 
> Written for literati fest on Tumblr. Title from "I Will" by the Beatles.

_Stars Hollow, Connecticut_  
Rory Gilmore isn't sure what running away feels like, but she thinks this might be it, because she has a suitcase that's filled with more books than clothes, a one-way plane ticket, and a blank notebook whose pages she wants to fill up and she's not entirely sure who she is anymore. She did everything right—Chilton, Yale, the nice boyfriend who holds her hand and follows her wherever she asks him to—and now, leaving, she should feel _something_. But the town wants her to stay sweet-faced and angelic forever and her grandparents want her to wear pearls and charm their friends with her perfect GPA and Dean wants her to spend every last minute with him and her mom wants her to never make any of the mistakes that she did and Rory just—she feels like there's something missing. She has no idea what it is. But she thinks she'd like to find out.

And as much as she loves her mom, she needs to do it on her own. So they talk (and argue) about it, talk (and argue) about it some more, and eventually come to an agreement that involves check-in phone calls twice a week, copies provided of her detailed itinerary, and a week in Paris together at the end of the summer. Lane makes her promise to look for a long list of bootleg CDs in the flea markets of Paris. Her grandparents are horrified but eventually mollified when she promises to call them too and maybe even look up some of her great-grandmother's friends. But when she tells Dean, he looks at her like she's personally betrayed him.

“I don't see why you have to go anywhere,” he says, scowling down at the pavement.

“Because the farthest I've ever been from Stars Hollow is Washington DC. I want to see new things,” she explains. “Drink coffee in Parisian cafes and see paintings that I only know from slides and walk through a new city at sunrise and...”

Dean just stares at her blankly. Then he slides his arm around her, just a little too tight, and asks her if she's really going to be gone for the whole summer. Before she can say another word, he starts talking about things that she doesn't care about anymore.

She's listening to him talk, the words floating over her head and away as she tries to remember where she is up to the Penelope Fitzgerald novel she's been reading, and when he leans in to kiss her, she leans back and away, shaking off his arm. She doesn't mean to do it. Or maybe she does.

She breaks up with Dean three days later. She doesn't feel as bad about it as she thinks she should. 

“Are you sure you're okay, honey?” her mom asks as she watches Rory pack. “You're not going to burst into tears when you're halfway over the Atlantic? Or drop your car off at the dump before you go? Or cut off all your hair and dye it bright blue, because I tried doing that once and the dye gets--”

“Mom, I promise I'm okay,” she says firmly and takes out another sweater to make room for _The Unbearable Lightness of Being_. She knows that her mom thinks it's going to be like last time, where she goes running back to Dean after a few weeks without him, blurting out that she loves him just to keep him. She also knows that a little part of her mom is hoping that she'll change her mind. Rory doesn't blame her for it. (But that doesn't mean she's going to do it.)

“I feel better, actually,” she adds. “Lighter.”

“Well, your suitcase doesn't.” Her mom gives the handle of her suitcase a tug and falls dramatically back onto the floor. 

“It's not _that_ heavy.”

“Quick,” her mom croaks. “Send help. Call an ambulance. Write a nice eulogy for my funeral.”

Rory finally gets her to stop composing her own obituary with the promise of obscene amounts of takeout.

 

The night before her flight, Rory snaps her suitcase shut and lies in bed, staring at the travel posters plastered around her walls. Her heart is beating double-time and there's a feeling she can't shake surging through her. Like there's something she's been chasing her entire life and she's finally about to get close enough to get a glimpse of it. 

 

_Paris, France_  
The first time she sees him, it's from across the lobby of her hostel. Rory spent most of her first day in Paris trying to fight off jet lag and getting hopelessly lost in the winding streets, but today she has her guidebook, a sturdy pair of shoes, and a tiny cup of coffee from the hostel's _machine du café_ and she refuses to let the city get the better of her. 

She's bent over her guidebook marking everything she wants to see with precise red stars when she glances up and she just—She doesn't quite have the words for it. Every last part of her body is _tingling_ , pins and needles radiating down her spine, but it's not an unpleasant feeling. It’s more like there's something tugging at her from behind, asking for her attention, whispering over her shoulder to just look. So she does. Her gaze catches on a guy reading across the room from her and stays there no matter how hard she tries to look away. He's got dark, messy hair straight out of the fifties, a jean jacket stretching across his shoulders, and a battered paperback open in one hand whose title she can't quite make out. She tells herself that she's only looking to figure out what he's reading. It has nothing to do with the color of his eyes or the notes that he's scribbling in the margins. Her interest is literary, and pure.

When he glances up and quirks an eyebrow at her, she blushes anyway. 

 

The second time she sees him, it's in the Metro. She has a massive map half her size that definitely makes her look like a tourist unfolded across her lap and she's trying to figure out the right stop for Sacre-Coeur and is half sure she's already missed it. Maybe she should have color-coded her map after all, no matter how much her mom had laughed at her when she’d tried to explain it. All she's got now is a map covered with red stars that are completely obscuring the metro stations and her guidebook is buried underneath it.

“It's Anvers,” someone says from above her. She looks up to find the guy from the hostel lobby, the corners of his mouth twitching up like he's trying not to smile. He leans down and taps a finger on her map. “The next stop. For Sacre-Coeur.”

Then he's striding off down the length of the car, paperback in his back pocket now, and she tells herself that she's not looking and she is anyway.

 

The third time she sees him, it's in Shakespeare and Company. She's in heaven, her arms filled with so many books that she can't quite see where she's going, and she quite literally runs into him. The books manage to stay in her arms but she reels back into a bookcase and immediately starts apologizing. She wasn't looking where she was going, she hasn't had coffee in at least three hours, she probably shouldn't be trying to carry eight books at once—He's just smiling as he listens to her ramble, until he finally cuts in and saves her from herself. (She's pretty sure that she's gone on some kind of tangent about Proust and cheese.)

“My fault, too,” he says with a shrug. “Walking and reading at the same time.”

“What are you reading?” she blurts out.

“ _A Moveable Feast_.” He tilts the book's cover towards her. Rory scowls at it like it's offended her personally. “Not a Hemingway fan?”

“It's painful,” she tells him. “I happen to like my sentences longer than five words.”

They happily spend the next half hour arguing about Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Eliot, Joyce, and Dos Passos and only stop when Rory yawns so widely that it almost splits her face in two. “I need coffee,” she explains. “And dinner. And maybe second dinner.”

“We could get dinner. Crêpes. I know a place that does massive ones for five or six euros,” he says and holds his hands up to demonstrate.

“I'll get two,” Rory says firmly.

“Two?”

“My mom and I are serious eaters. We've been single-handedly keeping Al's Pancake World in business for the past ten years. And the diner. And the ice-cream place. Possibly the hot dog stand, but they do a pretty good trade off the town hall meetings anyway...” She trails off, aware that she's rambling again. “But anyway. Crêpes sound good. I like crêpes.”

She's desperately trying to keep her voice casual but pretty sure she's failing anyway.

They eat crêpes stuffed with ham and cheese and mushrooms and get hopelessly lost in the winding cobblestone streets of the 5th and talk and talk and talk. He insists on buying her a cup of coffee the size of her head and she insists on getting them ice cream shaped like flowers and there's something intoxicating about all of it; the night and the warm air and the boy who's quoting Kerouac at her with a quirk to his mouth. Rory wants to devour every last moment until she's bursting with it, to memorize it until she can close her eyes and summon up this night anytime she wants.

“I'm Rory,” she remembers to tell him halfway through a glass of cheap red wine. They're squashed side by side in a little dark-paneled bar and she can feel the heat of him radiating through his jacket. She's resisting the urge to burrow into his side like a cat. 

“Jess,” he says and leans back into her a little. 

“You know,” he tells her when they finally part at the Metro stop, turning back over his shoulder to flash her a half-smile. “Ernest only has lovely things to say about you.”

Rory blushes all the way back to the hostel.

 

The next morning, he's sitting in the lobby again, bent over another book. Rory doesn't say hi exactly, just fidgets with the cornflakes about three feet away from him. She doesn't even like cornflakes. 

“Tell me you're not actually going to eat those,” he finally says. She's been stirring her cornflakes for so long that they appear to have become one with the milk. 

“Why, do you know somewhere better to go?” she asks quickly, before she can lose the nerve to say it.

“I might.” He shuts his book and tucks it into his back pocket. She's not entirely sure but she thinks it might have been one she was looking at yesterday at Shakespeare and Company. “Got any plans for the day?”

“I might be able to clear off my crowded social calendar. Even cancel a very urgent date with the cornflakes.” It isn't her best joke, not by a mile. Jess laughs a little anyway.

 

Rory doesn't quite know how, but Paris with Jess is something entirely different from Paris on her own. It's buttery pastry with a hint of pistachio and nougat that melts in her mouth and the blossoms on the trees that stretch over the Canal St-Martin and the flash of color of a mural at the end of a tiny stone street. It's the endless trays of treasures at the city's flea markets and the stand that dishes out massive plates of couscous at the Marché des Enfants Rouges and the park tucked away to the north of the city that they bring cheese and bread and their books to. She knows that there are swarms of tourists just a street or two over, armed with cameras and hefty guidebooks, but the Paris that she and Jess keep stumbling upon feels like it's never been discovered by anyone else before. Eventually she manages to talk him into going to the Louvre with her, because it's the Louvre and she has no intention of missing the Venus de Milo or the Mona Lisa, and even if he complains for the entire half-hour-long wait to get in, he goes silent when they finally see the Winged Victory presiding over a flight of stairs, washed in the afternoon light. 

“Thank you for bringing me here,” he finally says. “I would've missed a lot without you.”

And he glances over at her and the light is all tangled up in his hair and his eyes and he looks like he might kiss her and Rory—for a moment she wants him to. But she just broke up with Dean and she should still be upset enough about it to not even want to kiss anyone else and Rory Gilmore isn't the kind of girl who kisses boys she barely knows in museums. The logic may not quite make sense if she holds it up to the light but she hangs on to it anyway. 

So she moves a step away and she points out one of the informational plaques on the wall and she pretends not to notice the look in Jess' eyes when he almost reaches out a hand to her. 

_Brussels, Belgium_  
Rory goes to Brussels because she has a train ticket for Brussels and because she's not sure what might happen if she stays in Paris. They have _moules frites_ in Brussels. And waffles. And lots and lots of chocolate. She'll be fine.

She spends a day wandering through museums and drinking coffee at an outdoor cafe before she starts getting restless. Because the thing is, Rory's never really been alone before. She's always been with her mom or Dean or Lane or sometimes even Paris. She keeps glancing over to the side and expecting someone else to be there or open her mouth to say something and then shut it when she remembers there's no one to toss her words back to her. 

At first, she doesn't like it. She even tries striking up a conversation with the two other backpackers she's sharing a tiny hostel room with but after two painfully awkward exchanges about college plans and Brussels nightclubs, she gives up and retreats to a cafe to eat a waffle covered in fruit and powdered sugar and reread a Dawn Powell novel. It's not as terrible as it seemed at first. The next day, she buys a train ticket to Luxembourg for the day and…there are still some moments, when she's snapping photos of the streets or eating a pastry as big as her face, that she wishes someone else could be there for, but she tries five different kinds of chocolate in a tiny shop and finds a sunny spot in a flower-filled park to read in and she feels herself settling into something. A rhythm that feels like it was lurking beneath the surface all this time, trapped between the pages of her books or lingering beside the dregs of her last cup of coffee. Rory thinks she might do okay on her own after all. 

There's a tiny bit of her that wants to see Jess anyway.

_Amsterdam, Netherlands_  
She's halfway across a bridge in Amsterdam when she sees Jess again. Her heart does a traitorous leap in her chest and before she even knows it, she's turning around and fighting her way through a crowd of Swedish tourists to get to him. 

“You're here,” she blurts out when she's standing in front of him. Her cheeks are flushed from her dash across the bridge and the straps of her backpack are digging ferociously into her shoulders and she doesn't even want to imagine what her hair is doing but—It's Jess. He's here. And it's ridiculous that she's so excited about seeing someone she's only known for a week but she is anyway.

“You're here too,” he says. He looks at her like he's memorizing her all over again and Rory sucks in her breath until she's nearly shivering under his eyes. “So do you want coffee?”

“Always.”

They find a bright pink cafe and eat cake together. Jess lets her steal bites off his plate with a minimum amount of complaining and tells her stories about getting hopelessly lost in the rain in Antwerp.

“How'd you end up in Antwerp anyway?” she asks him.

“The ticket was cheap and I decided it was time to get out of Paris. Wasn't much left to see anyway.” He reaches across to swipe a bite of her apple pie and she's too busy squawking in indignation to ask him any more about it. For exactly five minutes later that night, curled up in her bunk at the hostel and unable to fall asleep, she lets herself think that he left Paris because she did. Then she opens her copy of _The Age of Innocence_ and tries to distract herself with Archer and Ellen's doomed romance. She ends up stuffing the book back in her bag and staring up at the cracks in the ceiling instead. They've decided to take on the shape of Jess' eyes. It's really not fair.

The next morning, Jess meets her outside the cafe she's marked with a bright blue star in one of her guidebooks. He’s slouching against a tree with a book tucked into one of his pockets. Rory can't help smiling the moment that she sees him. 

What they end up doing in Amsterdam more than anything else is walking, over bridges and along canals and through the Vondelpark. They rummage through trays and trays of trash and treasure at thrift markets, where Rory tries to convince him to try on a ridiculous straw hat and buy four different kinds of cheese. (Rory eats them all, Jess stops at three.) They walk through gallery after gallery at the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum and every other museum they can get into at a student rate. And some days, in between the galleries and markets and the store where she seriously contemplates buying a piñata for her mother, they walk nowhere in particular and talk about everything in particular. She hands over little pieces of herself—the way she and her mom seem to be on the same wavelength but sometimes don't understand each other at all, the person that everyone expects her to be but she's not always sure she is—and Jess picks them up and takes them as they are. Sometimes, he slips too—the father who's gone, the mother who might as well be—and she holds on to them as tightly as she can. She wants to puzzle Jess out and at the same time she never wants to stop finding out things about him. It's a giddy feeling. 

“Where are you headed next?” she asks him at a table at one of their favorite cafes. They've been there for half the morning, ordering a steady stream of coffee and breakfast food as Rory reads and Jess scribbles in the notebook he still won't let her look at. 

“I don't know,” he says. “Maybe Copenhagen. Maybe Berlin.”

“I was thinking of going to Copenhagen. If you wanted to keep on stealing my books, that is,” she adds quickly and concentrates on her eggs.

“I might. If you want me to.”

Oh, she does. 

_Copenhagen, Denmark_  
Rory kisses him in Copenhagen. She doesn't mean to. She doesn't even have the excuse of alcohol fogging up her head or the bright lights and swirling chaos of a nightclub or the cover of night. She kisses him in broad daylight, in front of a bright blue house in Nyhaven, simply because he's talking about books and cracking jokes about all the people on bicycles and smiling at her and she wants to. More badly than she's ever wanted anything before in her life. 

He sucks in his breath when she first kisses him, like he can hardly believe it's happening. Then he loops an arm around her waist and pulls her closer as he deepens the kiss. He has one hand on her cheek like she's something precious and he's teasing her mouth open with his and she could do this for the rest of her life. 

“I—I didn't mean to do that,” she gasps out when they finally break apart. 

“Do you want to do it again?” He's had a wicked smirk since the first moment she’d seen him but it's got an extra twist to it now. 

“Maybe,” she says, still dazed. “I'll keep you posted?”

One corner of Jess' mouth twists itself up all the way up. “You'll keep me posted,” he says and they keep on walking along the Copenhagen harbor.

A few minutes later, he reaches down to take her hand. She lets him. 

_Prague, Czech Republic_  
Prague is gorgeous and Rory is too busy having an existential crisis to appreciate any of it. Because she's dated exactly one boy in her life and she knew Dean's patterns by heart from the very beginning. Jess...Jess knocks her back off her feet. 

She makes a list in a park in Prague, with wax paper bags from a bakery spread around her. It's all the things she doesn't know:

What Jess is running from.  
Where Jess is running from.  
Where he's running to.  
What he'll do when the summer ends.  
What she'll do when the summer ends.  
What she--

“What are you plotting?” Jess asks as he flops down onto the grass, propping his head onto his elbows. He's just looking at her. It's nothing, really. Rory feels her heart leap a little in anticipation anyway. She tells it very firmly that no more kissing is going to happen until she's gathered all her data. It ignores her. 

“It's top secret,” she tells him. “All the cathedrals I'm going to make you go to.”

“Cruel, cruel woman.” He groans and collapses into the grass. Rory can't help tracing the line of his shoulder, her fingers snagging on the corduroy of his jacket before they slide along his neck and brush against his jaw. Jess leans into her touch like a cat and she's leaning down to kiss him again before she even realizes she's doing it. He tugs her down towards him, hands in her hair and teeth teasing at her bottom lip, and Rory sighs into his mouth and melts against him. The pro-con list ends up crumpled in the grass next to them. And maybe in the end there'll be a lot of things she doesn't know. But she might be okay with that.

 

_Rome, Italy_  
In Rome, Rory reads _I Claudius_ , eats astonishing amounts of pasta and gelato, and sleeps in the same bed as Jess. It happens accidentally-on-purpose. The hostel doesn't have any bunk beds left. A private room is only a few euros more if they split it between the two of them. And she likes the idea of reading next to him at night; him falling asleep with a paperback splayed open on his chest. (She hasn't brought him around to the concept of bookmarks yet.)

And maybe she likes the idea of other things too. Mostly all they've done is kiss, tangled up in each other in a tiny hostel bed, so close that she can count all the different shades of brown in his eyes. But it's the kind of kissing that carries the promise of something more behind it, long and deep and dizzying.

On their third day in Rome, after hours spent in the ruins of the Roman Forum and the Colosseum and sampling every gelato shop within a two-mile radius, Jess slides his hand underneath the hem of her shirt and lets it rest around the curve of her waist. He doesn't try to move it up or down, just keeps his hand warm and steady and curved under him until Rory presses herself against him with an indignant noise. 

“What did I do?” he asks and tries to keep his face perfectly innocent.

“You're teasing me,” she mumbles against his mouth. 

“Me? I'm not doing anything.”

“Exactly,” she huffs and pulls away from him for a minute to tug her shirt over her head before she loses her nerve. Jess just stares up at her with wide eyes. “You too,” she says sternly. “It's only fair.”

Jess laughs and pulls her back to him. She may never be able to figure him out completely, but every little piece she gets feels like a gift anyway. This is the way he kisses along the curve of her neck. This is the way his breath hitches when he touches her. This is the way his hands feel skimming along her sides. 

These are all the things that she'll never forget.

_Madrid, Spain_  
He finally talks her into reading Hemingway in Spain. _Talks_ isn't quite the word for it, but Rory blushes when she thinks about exactly how he convinced her to give The Sun Also Rises another try. (Her breath coming sharp and short, his hands careful and sure on her, the sounds she makes that he catches with his mouth.)

“I still don't think I like it,” she announces, the sheets twisted around her. She's wearing pajama shorts and one of Jess' terrible t-shirts that keeps on slipping off one shoulder. Jess is almost too distracted about it to have a proper argument with her about whether or not Hemingway has any redeeming qualities. Then she starts quoting directly from the book and that makes him sit all the way up and reach for his Hemingway and they're arguing about it while her legs are tangled with his and Jess tries to kiss her in the midst of a particularly pertinent point and this—she doesn't want this to end.

“Where are you going after this?” The words come flying up her throat in spite of herself. 

“I'm not sure,” he shrugs. “Back to New York, probably.”

“New York?”

“Lots of used bookstores. Good Chinese food. Only 82.4 miles from Yale,” he says it so, so casually but there's a faint pink tinge to his cheeks. 

“You looked it up?” she whispers and ducks her head down into the pillow to hide her smile.

“There's a computer in the lobby. It was a pretty quick search.”

Rory pounces on him and kisses him until they both forget all about Hemingway.

_London, England_  
All they do in London is read. They go to bookstore after bookstore, until Rory has to take half the clothes out of her suitcase to make more room for her books. They read over tea and during meals and on park benches and first thing in the morning and last thing at night. And no matter how much she reads, she still can't quite figure out the right words for how she feels about him. 

But she has a feeling that she'll find them. Maybe she'll have to write them herself. And maybe for now, it's enough to enjoy them. His hand in hers. His voice in the morning. _Him_. And her and the delicate, tough thing that's growing between them. Maybe that's more than enough.

Maybe, Rory thinks as she leans into him and turns another page, it's everything.


End file.
